...that if you happen to be on an old enough revision of NX-OS code, you'll wind up repeating the multi step upgrade you just started on the Data Domain DD660

3 separate upgrades in series for the storage switches.

I feel your pain.. Just went from SAN-OS 3.3 to NX-OS 4.2 to 5.0 to 5.2 on 8 9509's.. Was a lot of work but the upgrade went flawlessly. Of course this was after upgrading to sup 2a's on all of them so we could upgrade at all.

Not looking forward to our future addition of gen4 line cards, that'll require a reload to change the backplane's fabric mode to the higher speed..

Presenting $20 million in a quick fashion is hard. Interestingly, the client didnt care about the infrastructure portion of the proposal as they said "its fine, we trust you". I'm counting that as a win, especially in light of the fact that I was only 5 mins into my presentation.

Presenting $20 million in a quick fashion is hard. Interestingly, the client didnt care about the infrastructure portion of the proposal as they said "its fine, we trust you". I'm counting that as a win, especially in light of the fact that I was only 5 mins into my presentation.

Reminds me of the day we received a DL380G6 with 2 backplanes, only to find out that you have to order the internal connector between the controller and the second backplane separately. Great thinking, HP...

That it doesn't hurt to ask. Main desktop is now running an i7-3770, 16 GB RAM, 256 GB Samsung 830 SSD.

That some folks have trouble understanding instructions over the phone.

"Log in to vSphere and restart the VM - only reset it if it doesn't gracefully restart. It's persistent, so don't delete it or they will lose everything they saved locally" Somehow ended up with the person logging in to View Administrator, Deleting the virtual desktop, and clicking the radio to confirm deleting persistent disks. Oh well, a valuable lesson for the end user who had been saving everything to his local file system for several months, and hopefully something to speed up our move towards better profile management.

TIL (much to my shock) that Cisco cables can actually be cheaper than retail if your rep is hungry for a deal and has applied sufficient discount to the quote. Even more shocking to me is that this was on a <$50k deal not the multi-million dollar deals where you'll usually see that level of discount.

Presenting $20 million in a quick fashion is hard. Interestingly, the client didnt care about the infrastructure portion of the proposal as they said "its fine, we trust you". I'm counting that as a win, especially in light of the fact that I was only 5 mins into my presentation.

Now to find out if we win or not.

Not to be negative, but cover your buns tightly if you win. I get scared of people who don't want the details of what's being sold to them, they usually come back with changes or expectations that never got any farther than a thought in their head.

Presenting $20 million in a quick fashion is hard. Interestingly, the client didnt care about the infrastructure portion of the proposal as they said "its fine, we trust you". I'm counting that as a win, especially in light of the fact that I was only 5 mins into my presentation.

Now to find out if we win or not.

Not to be negative, but cover your buns tightly if you win. I get scared of people who don't want the details of what's being sold to them, they usually come back with changes or expectations that never got any farther than a thought in their head.

That on the HP Color Laser CP6015n series printer there are 2 small sensors where the fuser touches the printer. If one of those sensors is covered, then the printer won't warm the fuser generating a 50.1 Fuser Error.

Had a ticket come in today titled: KASPERSKY maybe a virus would be better?

Gave me a good laugh. They might be right.

They are right. I installed Kaspersky on a lab machine just to see what was up. IT rushed into my office a couple of days later demanding to know why my machine was communicating with a Chinese server. Guess where Kaspersky's malware update servers are?

Meanwhile it never seemed to do anything useful, it just put up a huge, gaudy "scanning" app and ate CPU.

That if I want to work for a certain restaurant chain in their hq data center, that prior to interview let alone contract offer, I must attend courses for something that suspiciously sounds exactly like a certain star studded cult.

And apparently, if I did get the job, I must take "continuing education" courses via that "education" company.

You should look on the bright side, you might get Tom Cruise to do your initiation......er, orientation.

YIL that if you are meeting with a self-proclaimed "System Administrator" you should always have a quick chat to find out what you're dealing with.

This guy tells me that if they need more IP addresses they'll just change the "second line of the IP address" from 255.255.255.0 to 255.255.254.0 which is all well and good until he starts going through the new IP addresses - .256-.257-.258-.259-.260-.261 Check please!

That if I want to work for a certain restaurant chain in their hq data center, that prior to interview let alone contract offer, I must attend courses for something that suspiciously sounds exactly like a certain star studded cult.

And apparently, if I did get the job, I must take "continuing education" courses via that "education" company.

30% to 50% more pay, though.

Even for a 30-50% pay jump, I don't know that I'd put up with that kind of nonsense.

Today I learned, well relearned TBH, that when people want to freeload calls, they can be pretty damn persistant about it. For the last 72 hours, some fool from Germany has been trying to register phones on one of my internet facing (for our WFH staff) ACD servers. After 5 failed registration attempts, the firewall starts dropping packets for them, so I really don't understand what they're playing at. Fortunately, Centurylink is only a couple of weeks from turning up our DS3s, and we can set up a VPN system instead.

I recall shortly after I first started working at a new local ISP in NYC (1997?) we were paying around $2500 for beige box servers. [...] -A Buslogic BT-948 SCSI card

FreeBSD?

Yep. Either 2.1.6 or 2.1.5, can't remember. We also had an old NetBSD 0.9 box that stayed around much longer than it should have. It was pretty neat, it took a fair amount of abuse as a shell server and mostly tolerated it. They guys prior to my arrival had also hacked NCSA httpd to do virtual hosts, long before apache even existed - they left lots of interesting things around.

Linux faired less well at the time. We ran a news server in-house and the nightly expire runs just killed it. That hardware got a FreeBSD install and was happy (but still overworked). Holy crap I hated INND.

M. Jones wrote:

sporkme wrote:

I think running on PC hardware put us in the minority back then - most other places were running Sun pizza boxes.

Yes, in that same position we were on Suns, but quite a few places were x86 -- usually due to having an x86 background. In hindsight I probably should have gone x86/BSD after they started shipping with ATX, PCI, and USB. Sun's reliance on margin-heavy servers over a balanced lineup, and true ambivalence toward Solaris x86, is what cost it the leading position in that game.

I can't say I ever really disliked Sun, but we never really had the cash to go proprietary with much of anything. I do miss them now, Oracle pretty much destroyed everything good that came out of Sun. To think that neither Sun nor Oracle could figure out how to make Solaris + ZFS some kind of marketable storage appliance kind of blows my mind.

Reminds me of the day we received a DL380G6 with 2 backplanes, only to find out that you have to order the internal connector between the controller and the second backplane separately. Great thinking, HP...

That is a SAS expander card. There isn't a way to use the second cage on the same smart array on the internal connectors without it. For performance an option is to add a second smart array and cable the second set of bays toit instead.

That if I want to work for a certain restaurant chain in their hq data center, that prior to interview let alone contract offer, I must attend courses for something that suspiciously sounds exactly like a certain star studded cult.

And apparently, if I did get the job, I must take "continuing education" courses via that "education" company.

30% to 50% more pay, though.

Even for a 30-50% pay jump, I don't know that I'd put up with that kind of nonsense.

I could be talked into attending ONE session, assuming I had a contract offer in hand. Apparently, they want it done prior to becoming a "serious candidate" that even gets interviewed by the company.

I'll see what they say to my response.

---

A large retail manufacturing firm called me in response to my application. Google Voice hilariously transcribed the message as being about senior citizens. HAHAHAHA.

The job seems okay. Big pay jump for doing 80% less work. The environment may be very political with 3 strictly siloed IT divisions each with its own IT director (very few employees each).

I have the option of staying put in my current job and promoting, and also becoming eligible to teach at a large university as an adjunct.

Reminds me of the day we received a DL380G6 with 2 backplanes, only to find out that you have to order the internal connector between the controller and the second backplane separately. Great thinking, HP...

That is a SAS expander card. There isn't a way to use the second cage on the same smart array on the internal connectors without it. For performance an option is to add a second smart array and cable the second set of bays toit instead.

The G6s we got all had the second cage already cabled to the controller. Seems like a bad BTO.

Had a LOT of little weird BTO issues with our G6 but none with our G5 and AFAICT none with the C7000 we just got in.

I can't say I ever really disliked Sun, but we never really had the cash to go proprietary with much of anything. I do miss them now, Oracle pretty much destroyed everything good that came out of Sun. To think that neither Sun nor Oracle could figure out how to make Solaris + ZFS some kind of marketable storage appliance kind of blows my mind.

I used to really dislike Sun (early 90's) as their stuff was cheap and nasty and my school had a tendency to replace DEC boxes I really liked with Sun hardware I really didn't. Then I met AIX and decided Sun wasn't so bad after all.... Then I got a job as a Solaris admin and Sun was teh awesum. Heh.

Anyway, had some powerful nostalgia this week. I actually did my first prom replacement. I know, charmed life that I never had to do one before... The battery finally died on my Ultra 2 at home.

Continuing the previous "what did you learn today", since that one appears to have gotten so large it's making the forum unhappy.

Since this is the server room, can we see something like a post-mortem on this? The Boardroom and Lounge have multiple threads of two to three times the size: what is different in this case? Is it a db partitioning scheme?

Since this is the server room, can we see something like a post-mortem on this? The Boardroom and Lounge have multiple threads of two to three times the size: what is different in this case? Is it a db partitioning scheme?

It happens in every forum. I do not think there is a specific size or age they break at, but for example the Deals thread in GESC goes AWOL every once in a while. I believe it has happened to some of the more popular threads so many times that the users simply start new ones around 200 pages - for example, the WoW thread is on its 13th or 14th incarnation. The other problem with the previous thread was that it existed before the latest migration, so you would see oddities like the timestamp link on the top of page 371 would actually take you to the top of page 370. The forum software simply wasn't designed to scale that high.

Since this is the server room, can we see something like a post-mortem on this? The Boardroom and Lounge have multiple threads of two to three times the size: what is different in this case? Is it a db partitioning scheme?

It happens in every forum. I do not think there is a specific size or age they break at, but for example the Deals thread in GESC goes AWOL every once in a while. I believe it has happened to some of the more popular threads so many times that the users simply start new ones around 200 pages - for example, the WoW thread is on its 13th or 14th incarnation. The other problem with the previous thread was that it existed before the latest migration, so you would see oddities like the timestamp link on the top of page 371 would actually take you to the top of page 370. The forum software simply wasn't designed to scale that high.

But why is there a 1320 page thread in the Lounge? Or a 567 page thread in the Boardroom?